Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/363

 sign it 'Cherry'—and see that it goes straight to the man poundin' the key!"

The young trained nurse slipped into a raincoat and with a wayward and by no means repugnant sense of excitement hurried down through the hotel to the street.

When she returned, twenty minutes later, she found her patient still intently watching the dial of the camera ohscura in the center of the room.

But that somewhat weary-limbed young nurse, keen as was her interest in the only half-decipherable drama being enacted about her, was even more interested in balancing the inexorable ledger of vital energy. The strain of many over-novel contingencies had, in fact, tired her out. Nothing but a miracle, she acknowledged, could keep her longer out of bed. So, as everything below stairs was quiet, she followed Sadie Wimpel's advice and turned in. Yet she did so reluctantly, secretly lamenting the lull in the drama which had secretly disappointed her. It was, after all, strangely different to the moving pictures she had witnessed, where action crowds on the heels of action and no tedious interregnum of waiting tires the nerves.

She fell asleep, a trifle guiltily, with a vision of